A private Victorian pleasure garden that became public parkland
Kew Beach
Named by an English immigrant after London's Kew Gardens, Kew Beach began as a private lakeside garden before the city bought the land and opened it as public parkland in the 1880s.
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Kew Beach takes its name from Joseph Williams, an English immigrant who purchased lakeside land in what is now the Beaches neighbourhood in the 1850s and developed part of it into a private pleasure garden he named "Kew" after the famous Kew Gardens near his hometown in England. Williams opened his garden to paying visitors, part of a wider 19th-century pattern of private lakeside resorts along Toronto's eastern shoreline.
From private garden to public park
The City of Toronto purchased the Kew property in the 1880s and converted it into public parkland, part of a broader civic push to secure lakefront access for ordinary residents rather than leaving it entirely to private resort operators. Kew Beach became one of the anchors of the wider Beaches neighbourhood that grew up around it, and the park and its boardwalk remain a heavily used public waterfront space, its name preserving the memory of Williams's original private garden more than a century after the city took it over.
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